This “Green thing”

Today as I was going through some papers I found an article that I thought I should blog. This article is for those youngins’, millennials, and 30 somethings to help them understand how we got so smart. I tweaked it a little bit to make it more enjoyable.

Enjoy, and think about what you are supporting and how your view is effecting your society in a negative way. Our generation had the 411 on the “ORIGINAL” ‘Green thing’. Listen to people who have been where you are right now. Trust me, they’ve got alot more wisdom under their belt than you. Did you get offended at that? It wasn’t a put down, simply a fact.

“Green Thing”

Checking out at the store one day, the young cashier suggested to the “much older” lady that she should bring her own grocery bags. She said, plastic bags are not good for–the environment.

The “much older” lady apologized to the young girl and began to explain some facts to the younger more uninformed cashier, “We didn’t have this ‘green thing’ back in my earlier days.”

The young clerk responded, “That’s our problem today. Your generation didn’t care enough to SAVE OUR ENVIRONMENT for FUTURE generations.” The “older” lady said, your right–our generation didn’t have the ‘green thing’ in our day, she went on to explain: we RETURNED milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they were recycled. But, we didn’t have the ‘green thing’ back in our day.

Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags, that we REUSED for numerous things. The most memorable thing was that we used our brown paper bags as book covers for our school books. This was to ensure that public property (the books provided for our use, by the school) was not defaced by our scribblings. Then we were able to personalize our books on the brown paper bags. But, to bad that we didn’t do the ‘green thing’ back then.

We walked up stairs because we didn’t have an escalator or elevator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine everytime we needed to go two blocks. But she was right, we didn’t have the ‘green thing’ in our day.

Back then we washed the baby’s diaper because we didn’t have the throw away kind. We dried the clothes on a clothes line, not in an energy-gobbling machine burning up 220 volts. Wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothes, we got brand new clothes at Christmas only and then mom made them. But the young cashier is right; we didn’t have the ‘green thing’ back in our day.

Back then we had one television (black and white with alot of snow) and didn’t have 24 hour programming like you do nowadays. We had a test pattern that would show up after programming was over about 10pm and an announcer that would come on and say “Parents, do you know where your children are?”, and if we didn’t have a television, we might have had a radio to listen to the news in the house–not a TV in every room and the TV screen was the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana.

In the kitchen we blended and stirred by hand because we didn’t have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn’t fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on HUMAN power. We exercised by working, so we didn’t need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But the young girl is right; we didn’t have the ‘green thing’ back then.

We drank from a fountain or a water hose when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blade in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull. But, we didn’t have the ‘green thing’ back then.

Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service in the family’s $45,000 SUV or Van, which cost what a whole house did before the ‘green thing.’ We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances, and we didn’t need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 23,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest burger joint.

But, isn’t it sad the current generation laments how wasteful “OLD FOLKS” were just because we didn’t have the ‘green thing’ back then?